Can America Meet the Challenge of Muslim integration?

A couple of years ago, a Bosnian woman now living in the Netherlands told me, “the situation here feels just the way it felt in Bosnia before the war began.” She was talking about the tensions in Holland between the Muslim and non-Muslim communities, where racism and hate are still intensifying on both sides, even now. And something in the air in America is starting to feel a lot like that.

Of course, civil war hasn’t broken out in Holland, and the situation in the USA is nowhere near as tense as it is there; but I can’t help but feel we are heading in the same direction.

And it’s not just about the mosques and the burning of Korans. It is the smaller things, the episodes and details that enter into our daily lives. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for instance Muslim complaints of religious discrimination have risen to record levels: 58.4 percent over claims from 2004 (religious discrimination charges for that same time period increased overall by 44 percent). In one particularly egregious example, supervisors at the JBS Swift meat processing plants allegedly hurled animal parts at Muslim workers, most of whom are Somali refugees. A lawsuit filed by Swift’s Muslim employees against the company, describes obscene anti-Muslim bathroom graffiti at the company’s Greeley, Colorado plant. In 2008, the suit alleges, Muslim employees of a Swift plant in Grand Isle, Nebraska were denied dinner breaks at 7:30 pm during Ramadan and were forced to wait to eat until 8:30 pm. (Dinner breaks were ordinarily scheduled for 9:15.) Muslim workers staged a walkout in protest, and were immediately fired – though several were soon reinstated.

But there is more to this than most media reports indicate. For one thing, in the case of the Ramadan incident, JBS Swift had initially complied with its Muslim employees’ request for an early dinner; only after non-Muslim workers complained that their Muslim colleagues’ absence from the work floor created a backlog and added work burden did they seek the 8:30 pm compromise. (I also can’t help but wonder how strictly religious these Muslims were, given that JBS Swift is not halal.)

Similar disputes over the right to prayer breaks have created similar conflicts around the country: employers often suggest Muslim workers use scheduled bathroom breaks for this purpose, rather than take additional time out (which is seen as being unfair to non-Muslim workers). And some Muslim women allege they’ve been demoted or even denied jobs because they wear the hijab, or headscarf. In one lawsuit filed against Disney, Moroccan immigrant Imane Boudlal donned a hijab in August of this year after two years working at Disneyland’s “Storyteller’s Café” without one. Disney claims that her scarf did not suit the restaurant’s turn-of-the-century theme, and suggested she wear a hat, instead – and one which would better suit the café’s style. According to the New York Times, however, Ms. Boudlal called the hats offered “un-Muslim,” and refused.

So is this a case of religious discrimination? Were the Swift workers treated unfairly? Was Boudlal?

The incidents in which bloody animal parts were hurled at Muslims in Greeley can be described only as deplorable. (Imagine women having tampons thrown at them, or Jews finding swastikas carved into their desks.) Reports of Muslims being taunted with jeers of “Osama” and “terrorist” show just how ignorant and hateful Americans actually can be.

But one has as well to question the legitimacy of claims of “religious discrimination” when Muslim workers seek time off at the expense of their non-Muslim colleagues, who in turn respond with anger. And then there’s the matter of the hijab.

This latter causes tensions all over the Western world, of course; France banned the headscarf and other items of religious clothing from public and government spaces several years ago, and other European cities debate doing the same. Muslims scream “Discrimination!” and protest in city squares. Personally, I don’t buy it.

In fact, in Turkey, where a ban was in effect for most of the 20th century (until being overturned by current President Abdullah Gül and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan), it is said that young urban women who have taken up the hijab do so not for religious reasons, but political ones, a statement of defiant alliance with Islam over Western culture, of identification with a movement that is anti-West, the 21st century’s more threatening version of anti-establishment, long-haired men and Flower Power.

When my friend, an Iraqi refugee, arrived in the US in 2007, she was offered a job as an anchorwoman with Al Arabiya TV – on the condition, said her Muslim prospective employer, that she remove her scarf. She refused, and found another job instead. Yet though she has since stopped wearing the scarf anyway – a decision she made of her own accord – she is no less a Muslim now than she was before. For as another friend, who was born in Morocco and spent most of her adult life in Saudi Arabia, put it: “my religion is between me and my God; it is in my heart, not in what I wear.”

Indeed, the fighting over hijabs strikes me as hypocrisy on many counts – not least because a 2007 Pew study found that the vast majority of Muslim women in America do not wear them. When those who do are confronted by women’s rights activists who declare the scarf a symbol of male oppression, the response generally is “I wear it out of choice.” Many Muslims, in fact, insist that the scarf – let alone the burqa – is not even mandated in the Koran. And even when she did cover her head, my fashion-conscious Iraqi friend did, indeed, often wear a hat, instead – unlike Ms. Boudlal.

So the thing is, despite the numbers being trumpeted about regarding incidents of anti-Muslim discrimination, the situation is not quite so dire as one might believe. Yes, the EEOC registered 1,463 complaints last year. Yes, that number is higher than it was the year before. But out of 1.5 million Muslim adults in this country, I’d say we’re doing reasonably well.

For now.

The problem is: the trend is getting worse, not better. Those 1,463 indicate a growing anger. Each of those 1,463 represents not a statistic, but a person.

They represent, too, a sign of fear. Americans increasingly read reports of rise in home-based Islamic extremism; they encounter news features on Somali-Americans who train in Somalia for jihad; and from this, they have come to fear their lives and principles will be challenged.

And why not? It’s happened already in Europe, where, for instance, the Dutch national railroad has stopped giving Christmas parties for fear of “offending non-Christians” – aka, Muslims. (Jews are not part of this equation.) A few years ago, construction workers in a largely Muslim neighborhood in the Netherlands worked through a heat wave in shorts and tee-shirts until Muslims living there complained; from then on, despite the oppressive heat, they were obliged to don long pants and long sleeves.

But this, I think (as did the Dutch) is taking accommodation way too far. It is, as it were, Rome changing for the Milanese. Inevitably, such efforts then result in anti-Islam backlash – both in Europe and, now, here at home.

And so the tensions grow.

I have no definitive solution here to offer. But I do know that we have an opportunity to learn from Europe’s errors – and learn from them, we must. We, as non-Muslims, need to learn what Islam is – and isn’t; to know what matters in the faith, and respect it; and know what doesn’t - -and refuse to be abused. And we must demand that Muslims do the same. America is not, and must never become, an Islamic country. But it also must not become a land of hate. As we stand to protect our lives and the values that define them, this is what will matter most.